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Old Floppy Drive Becomes New Turntable
vinyl1 writes "This must be the ultimate in retro-cool hardware hacking. The floppy drive is obsolete, but the turntable is not, and that got one guy to thinking. He provides a full tutorial on how to turn that worthless old floppy drive into a most desirable piece of audio gear."
I got two floppy drives and a microphone!
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Because he can.
There are some times I wish I had spent a little more time studying electronics than doing other things, and this is definitely one of those times. The most impressive part of the project is the variable resistor that allows him to control turntable speed manually. Unfortunately for me, I haven't got the knowledge, much less the gumption, to figure something like that out on my own.
I don't suppose he tested the torque of the motor to see how quickly he could get the record to playing speed. That's one of the key features that I understand to be important to audiophiles. And for the DJs, I imagine they are interested in what sort of clutch (?) mechanism there is that could help the motor recover from an accidental reversing of direction.
Seriously, I need to go to Barnes & Noble and pick up a book on basic electronics. It's one of those itches that I just haven't had the resources to scratch.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
If you RTFA, you'll see that the floppy is being used as a very cheap source of a small, low-vibration, brushless motor and control electronics, with a fast start up and low power requirements so it can be run of batteries, for someone who is making a custom turntable.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
...a hack allows you to read obsolete media of one type with obsolete hardware of another type.
Well according to the article (You did READ the article before sounding off didn't you ;) it's so quiet he couldn't hear the motor in operation and had to add an LED to be sure.
The actual turntable is quite cool because it's shaped vaguely like a Fender Stratocaster body with a glass platter.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
If you didn't know, a stylus is *not* an integral part of a turntable. It's a component (replaceable or not) of a *cartridge*. They're sold separately, just like tonearms so no ripping up involved.
This project only aimed to build a turntable(plinth, platter, bearing + motor), and not a tonearm or cartridge. They would be much more complex to DIY.
Ummm... wouldn't the turntable actually turning be a dead givaway???
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
If you RTFA, you'll see that the floppy is being used by a custom hifi shop to build a custom turntable. They're not doing this because they can't afford a turntable, or don't know where to buy one; they're using a floppy drive as a source of parts. The idea being that floppys are actually very sophisticated devices, and are only ridiculously cheap because of the huge economies of scale involved in their manufacture.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
As someone who's used his share of cheap belt-drive turntables acquired at garage sales (and then rewired), and who has had some experience at spinning platters this project needs:
Direct drive. There's a reason why DD turntables cost more. Those pulleys wear out, they slip, they stretch on start up and oscillate as they balance out. Why bother with a brushless motor if you're slapping it to a rubber band? Why praise the electronic speed control features of the floppy motor when you're wiring it to a system that by design can't regulate it? Give me torque. When I press that "go" button, I want it spinning perfectly at 33, 45 or maybe 78 RPM, now, not a quarter turn from now. I'm sure there's a way to wire a floppy to do just that, so get back at it!
cf. The Hold Steady, "Everyone's a critic and most people are DJs"
He's using an old motor AS A MOTOR. My mind is blown. I didn't think such a thing was possible.
Give this man a prize!
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uh, that's not a stepper motor
Not as impressive as the LP Ripper using a scanner.
Philip
Signatures are broken
You need a more powerful laser.
http://mirrordot.org/stories/e40c721288bda9f3e80e1 d99957ec156/index.html
I can't see this guys site now but I made a 7 inch floppy disc turntable 2 years ago with an old tape deck head as the stylus. Gutted the 7 inch floppy and mounted it on an old 78 rpm turntable. The big problem was that the tape decks recording/playback head being used as the "stylus" needed lots of weight pressed down on the gutted floppy disk to get it to record any sounds or just to playback. The sounds that came were very poor too. From the topic seems as if he is using the whole floppy drive? Hmmm... Cant figure out how you would do DJ scratching without getting an electrical shock.... Someone msg me when it's un-slashed.
Which is why I hate the new breed of slashdot users.
This was a home project - he did it because he wanted to, not because he needed to. Would you have preferred he watched survivor? Or that donald trump show? Maybe downloaded, so he could be spoonfed his entertainment.
This is one of the few slashdot stories of the past few days that actually belongs here. In my opinion.
Think about it for a minute.
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I sent a complaint to root@localhost just in case.
Just a minute... I have an email...
that part's not working out so well....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
...Lots of complaints about how it ought to be a damned vacuum cleaner motor or something. Wow and flutter, etc... Look. The mass of the "table" part and the LP itself are actually going to work in this thing's favor. The drive itself has very fine scale speed adjustments, but it's going to be applied to such a larger mass that the momentum (okay, the Angular Momentum) of the thing will reduce the motor's input to a gentle urge to speed up or slow down. Relatively, of course; the point is it's not going to whip an LP around like it were the moving part of a floppy, but it'll still get it going nice and quickly (YMMV).
The result will be very smooth, precisely controlled speed.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
For these kinds of DIY projects, I've been enjoying hackaday and the print version of Make Magazine (although I see they have a fair bit of stuff on the site now.) Being able to buy something doesn't invalidate the many reasons for doing it yourself, or in this case, the entertainment value of seeing that someone else did it.
If I had more time (and didn't live with my girlfriend) I'd probably do lots more of these kinds of things.
I think the major advantage of a laser turntable is that you wouldn't have to worry about the records wearing out. If you were careful not to scratch them, they'd probably last a lot longer than with a standard turntable. I imagine the high price tag has to do with low number of sales, as well as the fact that they are probably only going to be used by those with really delicate and rare records.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
As you'll notice, the turntable you linked to is "belt drive", which is great for playing records from start to end (like most people do), but if you try to stop and then abruptly start the record again, it takes the belt some time to get it spinning at the correct RPMs again.
So you get that cartoony effect where the sound starts out all slowed down and gradually reaches the correct pitch.
If you tried to scratch one of these, it's go like:
Rock the - rrrrrRRRRROOOOOCK the - rrrrrRRRRROoooock the beat!
Direct drive turntables are used by DJs and musicians because you can physically stop the record, or scratch it or whatever, and when you let it go, it'll return to the correct speed almost immediately, so it's like:
Rock the - Rock - Rock the beat!
Direct drive is better, but significantly more expensive, which is why it's cool that you can make them out of something as crappy as a floppy drive.
"... turn that worthless old floppy drive into a most desirable piece of audio gear."
...
It'll play my 8-track tapes??
Oh
While working on the Laservision scheme the Philips engineers realized that what they should do instead is completely redesign the system from scratch. They joined up with a group of Sony engineers working on a similar project and the result is known as Compact Disc.
What this guy has done is to turn his floppy drive into (part of) a gramophone. In other words he has turned a recently obsolete technology into an even more obsolete technology.
Vinyl records were a dreadful technology. They scratched, they wore out and the sound from them was distorted in all sorts of ways by the production process. Worst of all they allowed 'audiophiles' an excuse to spend $15,000 plus on equipment and then brag about it at tedious length.
The high end market for audio equipment is essentially a high tech version of the fortune teller industry. The service is essentially a fraud; if there is a difference in sound it is negligible. People pay for it because of the flummery thaqt surrounds it.
This guy has just discovered that you can get a high quality motor for about a buck.
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You know, I have one simple request: and that is turntables with frickin' laser beams on their tonearms!
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One of my treasured posessions is an old external SCSI CD-ROM drive (with a digital audio out) I got it out of the trash at work many years ago. I tell my audiophile friends it's my elite CD transport. It meets all the requirements: it doesn't look like one they've seen before, it doesn't even have a D/A converter, it requires a weird process to load a CD (uses the old CD trays), and, best of all, it has no cue or review buttons, nor does it have a remote. Nothing says audiophile like a bad user interface!
If one of my audiophile buddies doubts I spent $2000 on it, I show him the old SCSI cable I have connected (only on the one end), which is about half an inch thick, and ask him if his connection cable is that good.
I've had more fun with this thing than one man should rightly have. It does a fine job of playing CDs, too - back when CD ROM drives cost $400, they built them solidly - I never did find out why someone threw it away. Hmmm, maybe I should start claiming it uses tubes internally - nothing makes a digital signal sound good like using tubes!
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